Cardiac Fitness Before Surgery: What Tests Should I Do?
Cardiac fitness is a term used to define the ability of our cardiovascular system to maintain adequate circulation to the organs while our body is undergoing the stress of surgery. If the heart is healthy and functioning properly it can pump enough blood to the important organs like the brain and maintain the body’s functioning. […]
Stress Dobutamine echo
What is an Echocardiogram? An echocardiogram is a noninvasive radiological investigation that uses high-frequency ultrasound waves to assess the heart’s structure and function. These waves either pass through or bounce back after hitting on the heart, and the reflected signals are used to create images on a computer screen. We can then assess the structural […]
Pacemaker: Get it Going Fast!
How Your Heart Beats Your heart is a muscular pump consisting of four chambers, two on the left side and two on the right. The chambers are contracted according to signals from your heart’s electrical system to keep it beating at appropriate rates —typically 60 to 100 beats per minute in a resting adult. A […]
Coronary CT: Why, How, and When?
What is a Coronary CT? Coronary CT, or in cardiologist’s terms, a coronary CT angiography, is a non-invasive medical imaging procedure that uses x-rays to look at the status of the blood vessels of your heart after those structures are enhanced using a dye [1]. Rather than a conventional x-ray that gives a 2D image, […]
Antihypertensives: What do we have?
Your heart health is usually reflected in several indirect ways, and one good parameter is long-term blood pressure control. If you are a patient suffering from hypertension, you will probably need an appointment with your cardiologist. Non-Pharmacologic Therapy Most consultant cardiologists will not jump straight into medications, and this should be considered a good thing […]
Primary Angioplasty – Freedom from Heart Attack
What Is a Heart Attack? The proper medical term for what we call a heart attack is “myocardial infarction.” It occurs when part of the heart does not receive an adequate blood supply to function properly. When a low blood supply continues for too long, the heart muscle undergoes irreversible damage resulting in myocardial death. […]
HOPE 3 TRIAL: THE NEW FINDINGS
The HOPE-3 trial was initiated by a group of cardiologists who asked themselves the clinical question that most heart specialists have been wondering. Can a combination of lipid lowering drugs and blood pressure lowering drugs have more benefit for our heart health than either of them alone? So, what happened in the HOPE-3 trial? Over […]
Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy
Your heart health is very important because your heart is the muscle that pumps blood throughout the body. The heart is made up of four chambers- 2 above (called atria) and 2 below (called ventricles). For efficient pumping, the chambers must contract in a coordinated manner. If this is uncoordinated it can lead to ineffective […]
COVID-19 and Heart Disease
No event in the 21st century so far was more destructive than what the “COVID-19 pandemic” has done to the world. Killing people by the hundreds of thousands, stealing loved ones away before their time, and decimating people’s livelihoods, this virus is ruthless. It does not discriminate based on wealth or ethnicity. It’s common knowledge […]
Physical Activity and Heart
We need our heart for love, life, and everything in-between as a reference as well as a vital organ. This beating lump of muscle and nerves plays a crucial role from our birth until death. It’s human nature to not recognize the importance of something, take it for granted, so to speak until we realize […]